Matthew Margolis

It Happened So Fast
For every adult who resides with both a dog and a child under the same roof, I have four words: It happened so fast.
But they are not my words. They are the words of Jesse Browning of The History Channel’s “Ax Men.” He used them to describe the incident that took his 4-year-old stepdaughter’s life last Sunday.
On the afternoon of Feb. 28, Ashlynn Anderson’s mother found her bleeding on the family’s front lawn near Astoria, Ore. One of the family’s Rottweilers was standing next to her. The little girl was seriously wounded and did not survive the Life Flight to Oregon Health and Science University Hospital in Portland. She died of injuries sustained during a dog attack.
A while back, the Brownings were a three-Rottweiler family. But one of the dogs reportedly bit an adult family member and was subsequently euthanized. On the day Ashlynn was mauled, two Rottweilers and a Labrador were in the fenced back yard and she was alone in the front yard. It is not clear how one of the dogs got loose or what triggered the attack. Clatsop County Sheriff Tom Bergin said, “Apparently, the dog just snapped.”
I took two calls about aggressive dogs last week. The first was from a woman who adopted a dog six months ago. The dog recently bit her friend. But, she told me, for the first six months he showed no signs of being a biter. He would just “growl and snarl and lunge and stuff.”
The second call was from a mother whose dog had just bitten her daughter’s friend. She, too, said her dog had never shown signs of aggression. She summed up the dog as being primarily a backyard dog that had never been socialized. I asked her whether they walk the dog. She said no. I asked her how the dog reacts when people come over to the house. “Hackles up, tail down.” She basically described a dog that could easily be triggered to bite.
Then I got this e-mail from a reader:
“Six months ago, we got Rocco from an abusive home. He was 3. He barks at a knock at the door and at the doorbell. He barks and growls when anyone walks down the hall toward the bedroom where he is sleeping. He loves and sleeps with our 13-year-old daughter. But he bit our older daughter when she was hugging the 13-year-old. During the past month, he has bitten three of the 13-year-old’s friends. He seems fine with the friends at first, but then, out of nowhere, he bites them with no warning. He lived in a household with kids in the past, and we were never told that he bit anyone.”
Snarling, growling, lunging, snapping -- these are all bright red flags and are not to be ignored, especially when children are involved. Dogs that engage in these behaviors are warning you that they will bite. And when they do, there might not be a “later” or a “second chance” to pay attention.
By all accounts, Ashlynn had only been outside “a couple of minutes.” And after the attack, “everyone was there in minutes,” said Bergin. “But she was pretty severely mauled. By the time they got her to OHSU, she had lost too much blood.”
It happens that fast.

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